


tethered mind free from the lies

by meliebee



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Deaf Character, Deaf!Vanya, Gen, Self-Exploration, Vanya Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Vanya makes friends and copes with trauma, please validate me!!!!, the relationship tags will keep updating as I add more chapters so keep an eye out for ur faves!!, the siblings will sort their shit out eventually. we just gotta be patient, uhh more tags to come I guess??
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-06 20:46:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18396053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meliebee/pseuds/meliebee
Summary: It turns out, she’s not that hard to fix. A couple jumps, a couple nudges to the side—crises averted. Allison can talk, the moon doesn't explode, Pogo isn't strung up on the wall. Vanya still goes deaf in one ear. (She doesn’t tell the others. They don’t ever ask.)or, Vanya loses her hearing and also everything she thought she knew about herself. This is the aftermath.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> yeehaw it's ur girl with another procrastination fic
> 
> anyways I am not Deaf so there is definitely the possibility that something here comes across as offensive or inaccurate. please tell me! I am doing my best but am no expert and would really hate to hurt somebody with this story. 
> 
> enjoy folks and remember: Vanya deserves better and by heck she shall receive it

Vanya ends the world, and then she wakes up.

 

They talk a lot, in the early days. Too much. Five rambles about time streams and continuities, Allison tries to catch Vanya’s eyes, Luther’s brow furrows as he works through the dozens of half-truths and lies he’s been discovering. Diego doesn’t seem to care, not really. Klaus is struggling through something, but he always is.

They talk a lot, about the apocalypse that wasn’t, about Vanya’s potential for hurting them and what to do about her, about Reginald and what else he must have hidden from them—because, well… she’s only Vanya. Just Vanya. There must be bigger secrets. Secrets about them. 

As it turns out, she’s not that hard to fix. A couple jumps, a couple nudges—crises averted. She’s still cold turkey off her suppressant medication, but Allison shifts a few steps to the left and her throat is saved. Leonard still screams at her and says terrible things, but a knock on the door saves him from a grisly end, saves Vanya from blanking out. (Five kills him later anyway.) Luther still squeezes her lungs until they nearly burst, and she still slams her fists against the door, but Five blinks in and out and she stumbles towards her concert without a trail of carnage behind her, without Pogo’s body strung up on the wall. Allison shoots the gun but does so before Vanya traps her brothers in light, before her brothers come rushing at her with murder in their eyes.

They don’t tell her much about their changes to the timeline, not when she was still passed out and not when she woke up in a house she could have sworn that she destroyed.

Vanya still goes deaf in one ear, at least partly so in the other. She doesn’t tell the others. They don’t ever ask.

So the world doesn’t end, after all, but Vanya does. She sits, hands by her sides, messy hair framing her face, and listens to them talk and talk. Luther votes to drug her back up, Klaus doesn’t give a shit and rarely contributes, Allison thinks a slow transition would be best, and Diego doesn’t know but thinks she should be carefully watched.

Five always has a weapon when he talks to her, thinks she doesn’t notice but she does. Diego looks at her with more (or less?) than hate, now, with wariness—she was never his sister, but she was something and now she isn’t. Worse than a stranger: a threat. Allison is trying but Vanya can’t look her in the eyes. Luther blocks the door when she enters a room and every time, Vanya’s throat closes up. Klaus is Klaus, doesn’t often try to connect with her but never seems quite there when he does.

Vanya sits, silent, listening to them talk as best she can with her newly deafened ears, and thinks  _you know what, fuck this._ She’s going to need to find a new orchestra, after her sister held a gun to her head and exploded her eardrum in the middle of her concert. She’s going to need to find a new apartment, after her boyfriend turned out to be a murderous manipulator and destroyed whatever illusion of safety she had there. She’s going to need… a new life. Vanya sits, hands by her sides, mouth closed, and thinks  _fuck this._  

 

When Vanya was eighteen, she left home. She didn’t tell anyone and didn’t take anything but her violin. No one came after her, no one called her, no one said anything. Vanya had expected it, because she’d been sneaking out of home for weeks at a time since she was sixteen, but she still cried about it.

When Vanya is twenty-nine, she does it all again. This time, the siblings notice, and she’d expected them to: this time she’s not useless number Seven, she’s Reginald’s dangerous little fuck-up. It still takes them the better part of a day, and by then Vanya’s already packed her clothes into boxes and has three potential rental places to check out. She doesn’t have too much to take with her, when it comes down to it, because Vanya’s always been ordinary. That meant: no powers. That also meant: no hobbies, no talents, no colour, no quirks, no distinctions or unique characteristics. That meant: boyfriends who Vanya never loved.

God, she’s angry.

She reminds herself to see a therapist. She doesn’t need her siblings to fix her, but she doesn’t want to stay feeling like this (so broken) either.

Vanya has spent her whole life just getting by. Calling her landlord to inform them of her immediate move, she thinks to herself: _time for that to change._

 

She goes back to the house, says she just went for a walk. (Her landlord is angry but can’t do much; her contract was coming to an end anyway.) Five narrows his eyes at her but doesn’t seem suspicious. Vanya’s never really lied to her siblings before; she’s never had a reason to tell them anything, much less something untrue.

She’s such a shitty sister.

Luther glowers from the doorway while Five berates her, _don’t be_ _so irresponsible,_ Allison fluttering nervously around the kitchen like she thinks Vanya didn’t leave of her own volition. Diego watches her with cold eyes, uncaring but untrusting. Klaus giggles, _it’s not so bad, chill out, Five._ He winks at her when Five isn’t looking.

Mom says, “Vanya, can I make you some cookies?”

Vanya looks at her, says “sure, mom,” and doesn’t eat any of them because she doesn’t know if they’re going to be drugged. She’s a shitty daughter, too.

 

She’s contacted a new place by the next morning, run-down with cracks in the walls, half the size of her old apartment. The landlady is an old Italian woman who takes Vanya’s face in her hands and asks what she’s running from. Vanya stares. The woman pats her cheek, shrugs, and says it doesn’t matter. Everyone's running, in the city. 

Her name is Maria. She points at Vanya’s violin case, says: “That gonna be loud?”

Vanya blinks. “Oh, uh.” She’s never going to play that violin again. It’s still white. “No, um.” She gestures at her ear vaguely. “I don’t think I can play very much anymore.”

The woman sends her a surprised look, midway through opening the front door. Her face crinkles, wrinkles folding by her eyes. 

“Hearing loss,” Vanya explains meekly.

The woman shrugs again, clucking her tongue. “Well, if you figure out, I’m fond of swing.” Her eyes are warm, and Vanya shifts the case in her hands so she can hide behind it, smiling weakly and failing at it.

 

She goes home. This time, Five is waiting. Arms folded. “Where were you?” He’s still taller than her, even at age thirteen. Well. Size thirteen, age fifty-eight.

“Walking,” says Vanya. Her ears are ringing, the city’s traffic playing on loop. “Sorry.”

Five narrows his eyes at her. “Don’t lie to me, Vanya.” There’s a knife in his pocket.

“I’m not, Five.” She takes a breath and plasters a smile on her face. “I just like the fresh air.” She looks at the floor, then the walls. “I haven’t been back here in years. It gets a little much.” It's not even a lie. 

His shoulders relax, just a tiny fraction, and Vanya is careful not to do the same. “Well.” He still sounds cross. “Stop doing it. You’re basically a bomb right now, Vanya. Until we figure out how to diffuse you, stay home.” He pops out of sight in a flash of blue. Vanya’s smile is wooden and glued to her face. It takes her a few moments to remember how to move.

 

Diego comes up to her when she’s helping Mom make tea that she won’t drink. He sits at the table and she can feel his eyes on her. It's stressing her out. Mom leaves the kitchen with a kiss to her cheek and on Diego’s head, and Vanya steels herself. Deep breaths. She pours two cups, then sits in the seat across from him, pushing one mug towards him. Her fingers curl around her own, claws, steam rising up to tickle her cheeks.

Diego accepts his mug with a small incline of his head. She hopes he isn’t waiting for her to speak. Her eyes rove around the kitchen nervously. Finally, he says: “So where do you go on your walks?” Vanya looks back to him, finding his eyes already on her. She has to watch his lips to make sense of his words. 

She shrugs half-heartedly. “Parks. The city. Places I haven’t seen before.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Doesn’t it get loud?”

He means with her powers; doesn’t it get loud with her powers? Overwhelming? Vanya swallows, looks down. No, Diego, it doesn’t get loud. Nothing is loud. “Not really,” she says instead, faintly. To soothe him, she adds honesty: “I can’t stand being in this house.”

Diego snorts into his tea, scarred fingers curling around his cup and lifting it. “Me either,” he says. “I think Klaus only stays because he has nowhere else to go.”

If Klaus wouldn’t tell the others, Vanya would invite him to come with her. Maybe he wouldn't tell the others. He wouldn’t stay. Or, well, the old Klaus wouldn’t—would stay for a few days, raid her cupboard, then leave: predictable. She isn’t really sure what he’d do now. She likes Klaus. Doesn’t understand him, but she likes him. He scares her, a bit, but a part of her has always wanted to protect him.

The consequences of hearing your little brother shriek in his sleep.

 

That night, Allison comes and finds her with a cup of hot cocoa. She holds it out with such a hopeful expression that Vanya can’t refuse her, smiling faintly and accepting the cup with quiet thanks.

They’re in the library. Before everyone left, Vanya was the only one who ever used it. Reginald was always busy, Five and Ben had died (or, well, gone to the future and the ghostly realm respectively) and Pogo didn’t often see her in its nooks and crannies.

“Vanya,” says Allison when the quiet stretches.

“I’m sorry,” replies Vanya. She isn’t sure how quiet she’s being because everything is underwater and fuzzy, but Allison hears her. “I’m so sorry, Allison. I’m really sorry about everything.”

“Me too,” whispers Allison. “Can we try again?”

Vanya looks at her. She nods. She remembers Allison saying something similar, and then going behind her back and researching her boyfriend and breaking into his house and keeping her out of family matters even after saying _yay sisters_ , and not listening to anything Vanya said. Leonard deserved to be researched, and habits are hard to break, and Vanya rarely speaks up about anything, but. _But_.

Vanya is tired. She is sorry, and she is hurting, and she doesn’t want to be hurt again.

Allison smiles, a big bright smile like Vanya saw in the wedding photos published in magazines. She reaches out and grips Vanya’s hand, squeezing. Vanya tries not to recoil. She does love Allison. She does. She can’t even be angry about the gun (yes she can) because she took Allison’s voice first (but she got it back) so it’s only fair that Allison took her hearing (not all of it but enough) and well, Vanya isn’t even sure that any of her siblings have realised she can’t hear very well so she can’t really hold a grudge.

She smiles back at Allison and thinks _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry._

 

It’s easier to leave than she’d thought. (That, at least, is predictable.) Allison and Luther head off together to LA for the upcoming weekend, Allison desperate to visit Claire and Luther desperate to work out whatever was between them. Diego headed off to do whatever the hell he did, wherever he did it. Klaus wandered in and out of the Academy, sober but not sharing whatever it was that he was fixating on, and Five popped in every few hours in varying levels of harried distraction.

She spends two days in the increasingly empty house, and then thinks _well, now’s as good a time as any._

* * *

 

The movers are named Matteo and Gio. They laugh at how light Vanya’s boxes are, say she’s their easiest client yet.

Maria is waiting at Vanya’s new place, pie in hand. Once all the boxes are in the apartment, Vanya’s little table is set up in the kitchen, the walls jutting out from the apartment and windowed on all three angles of the little cubby. Maria slices the pie while Gio helps Vanya string up fairy lights above the worn-out cabinets and the table’s windowed section, and Matteo unpacks her dishes for her even after she tells him not to bother.

It doesn’t take very long, to move her entire life from one set of rooms to another. The violin is leaned in the corner of the kitchen-living-room, far away from the door leading to Vanya’s bedroom. Her new place is smaller than her old one, but not tiny: the kitchen is a squeeze, but it blends into the living room, and she knows she could have fit a couple students in here if she was still able to teach, to play, to hear. Her bedroom is small, but still bigger than what Vanya had grown up with at the Academy. The bathroom is yellow and orange. The floor is light blue, and the shower comes with psychedelic seventies curtains. Maria’s already installed a fire alarm, specialised for those with hearing loss: it’s very loud, and it flashes. The doorbell flashes too, bright white in three bursts. She hadn’t even thought about that.

Maria’s pie is pumpkin. Matteo calls it a work of God, and Maria swats his arm for it. Gio asks if Vanya’s familiar. “Wrote a shitty book one time,” she says, and Maria clucks her tongue disapprovingly.

“So you play violin?” Vanya shrugs.

“Hearing loss,” she says, picking at her piece of pie while Matteo reaches for a third. “So, um. Not anymore?” She thinks, belatedly: why're you telling them this, Vanya? 

“Sucks,” replies Gio sympathetically, leaning too far back on his chair. “You know ASL?”

“Oh,” says Vanya, thrown by this. “No.” She flushes, because, well, she probably should, shouldn’t she? She can still... mostly hear, but it’s… muted. She looks at people’s lips when they talk to her because otherwise the words run into each other, tumbling. Maria has to pat her shoulder to get her attention. The doorbell flashes because otherwise Vanya won't hear people entering her apartment. “It’s a pretty new thing.”

Gio shrugs, “Yeah, that’s chill. The community centre down on Elm does ASL classes if you’re interested. My niece Rosalie, she’s Deaf, so I took a couple when she was really little, y’know how it is.” He smiles at her, warm and friendly and open. “I can write their number for you, if you want? No pressure.”

Vanya doesn’t even have to think about it. “Yes, please.”

Before they go, Matteo gives her a list of appliances she might want to look into, and where to get them cheapest. Talking kettles, vibrating watches, flashing clocks. So much change. Vanya thinks: _I should probably see a doctor, get a diagnosis._ Reminds herself to do that, and then see the therapist. Self-care. 

After they’ve all left, there’s leftover pie left in a Tupperware container placed on the countertop. Her typewriter sits on her table, blankets draped over the couch, and  _Extraordinary_ goes right to the back of her only bookshelf. She sits on the couch, draped in fuzzy blankets that make it a bit easier to breathe, and flips through the newspaper. She’ll need a new orchestra, probably. She hasn’t checked yet.

 

The conductor says she played well. It’s not—Helen, not perfect or beautiful, but it’s enough. She’s enough. He sounds shaken by the whole _armed force invading concert_ event, but he doesn’t scream at her or accuse her of ending the world. It’s also kind of very hard to hear him through the phone, pressed right up against her mostly-functional ear. Vanya makes a mental note to buy an amplifying telephone.

“I meant to check on you, to see if you were okay.” She thinks he sounds regretful, kind of concerned. “No one had your number.”

“Oh,” says Vanya, “I’m okay. Sorry for worrying you.” Wrong this to say: he hadn’t been worried. She spent years at third chair. “I, uh. Moved.” No one had her number before then, either.

He laughs over the phone, harried-sounding. She flinches. “No, no! It’s just, well. I think some of them were talking about. Lunch?” What. “Do you have a pen and paper?”

“Yes?”

He gives her the number of a second-chair, her name is Aimee and Vanya has really never talked to her before. She seems kind and pretty and vibrant and she got in a lot of friendly arguments with Helen, before Leonard kidnapped Helen and killed her. Presumably. The conductor says Aimee was asking around for her number, trying to get a hold of her. Says she and some of the others were concerned, hadn’t seen Vanya running from the concert and then couldn’t find her.

“Give her a call for me, would you?”

“Sure,” agrees Vanya, very faintly, staring at Aimee’s number.

“Thanks, Vanya. See you at Wednesday recital.”

“See you,” Vanya echoes, and waits for the line to go silent. She squints at the phone number.

 

She leaves Aimee a message.

It sounds like this: “Hi, Aimee, it’s, um, Vanya Hargreeves—” She deletes it.

“Hi, Aimee, I’m Vanya, from, uh, orchestra. The first chair? Anyway—”

“Hi Aimee, uh, sorry for ruining the concert—”

“Hi, Aimee, Vanya calling. I heard you were asking for my number, so—”

 

“ _Hey, Aimee, this is Vanya Hargreeves? Sorry about the phone number confusion, I moved house really recently. Hope you’re well.”_

 

She goes down to the community centre on Elm, Monday evening at 7:30 sharp. (Luther and Allison must be coming back soon. Diego must have visited the cademy by now. Is Klaus okay? What's Five up to?) There’s a woman at the centre, waiting outside, with braids that turn pink-purple midway through to her waist. Her name is Mia, and she asks if Vanya’s there for the ASL classes.

“Yeah,” says Vanya, after convincing herself not to turn around and go home.

“Cool,” says Mia, with a bright smile. “Do you sign already?”

“Oh, uh, no.” Vanya tilts her head, amends that: “Not yet? I want to try, try learning.”

Mia’s smile is blinding. Vanya has to blink. 

The group isn’t huge. Two teenagers, tentatively becoming friends. An expectant mother who thinks her son might be Deaf, genetically, and wants to learn anyway. A truck driver who wanted a new skill. Mia, who learned because of her Deaf sister. Vanya. A man in a wheelchair named Felix. A father of two who’s losing his hearing. A Deaf man who likes helping people learn. A grandmother with severe hearing loss.

ASL isn’t easy, but Vanya has also done harder things. She picks it up. By the end of the first class, she’s becoming familiar with the alphabet. (By the end of the second and third, she’s moving on to sentence structure and names.) She finds that she enjoys it, despite her shyness and insecurity. It’s harder to wallow in her fear and sadness and anger when she’s in a group of people learning alongside her.  

They give each other names, _Ant_ for Anthony with the two kids, _OMA_ for the grandmother, _Wheels_ for Felix by his suggestion. Vanya is _seven:_ index and middle finger out, pinky out, ring finger touching thumb.

“Tell me,” says Mia when they’re standing outside together after the class, “what made you come tonight?” The streetlights illuminate her dark skin and the curve of her jaw.

Vanya could say: a removalist called Gio. She could say: fear.

“I guess,” she says, “I’m tired of letting things happen: to me, around me. I want to learn control.”

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaah thank you all so much for your comments!! i love you all. y'all seriously all mean the world to me. 
> 
> I don't love the ending to this chapter (or this whole chapter in general lol) but this is what happens when a story becomes like 7k longer than you expected and there's still more to come!!! also, TW for a panic attack at the end of this chapter!!! please be careful. <3

It’s Tuesday, 8am. Vanya is leaning on the window, arms folded. She’s staring at the violin case. She hasn’t had the courage to move it anywhere, yet.

 _Just pick it up, Vanya._ Vanya draws her arms closer to her body. _It’s just a violin._ But it’s not. It’s a weapon. (It’s that realisation, more than anything, that makes her push off the window and take the first few steps towards it. Because, well. She’s a weapon too.)

She drags the case to the couch, and then she sits and stares at it some more. _Just a violin._ She leans forward, unclasps it, and then opens the lid. Immediately, she draws in a sharp breath and leans back, hands flying away as though they’ve been burned. It’s still white.

 _Just pick it up, Vanya._ (Vanya does.)

It fits against her skin like it always has. Strings form well-worn divots against her fingertips, familiar from years of practice. Nobody ever taught her the violin. Music, her ability with it, that was all her. Vanya takes a deep breath and picks up her bow, standing in the centre of her living room.

 _Just play, Vanya._ Vanya does.

(It’s not the same.)

(It’s not right.)

She stands there, eyes shut so she doesn’t have to see her vision go white, playing and playing and trying so hard. It could have been hours, or minutes. The world could have ended and Vanya would not have been surprised. 

(It’s not the same.)

Her bow moves without thought and her calloused fingers ache as they dance over the strings. The room stays still. Nothing moves.

There is only Vanya and her violin.

There is only Vanya.

 

Maria knocks on the door. She’s holding a plate: apricot pie, this time. It’s still steaming. Freshly baked.

“You were playing your violin,” says Maria. “It sounded good.” Vanya’s eyes are red-rimmed.

“It wasn’t good enough.”

Maria clucks her tongue. “Do you want to improve? Everything takes time. This is just something to get accustomed to.”

Vanya takes the pie. Does she want to improve? Does she want to keep playing the violin? Or will it forever be a weapon, a reason for Five to reach for a gun, a reason for Vanya to close her eyes in fear?

Maria’s fingers, gnarled and thin, cover Vanya’s where they hold the plate. “Music isn’t all there is,” she says. “Remember that.”

“Okay,” replies Vanya. Her voice sounds very small, even to her own ears. Music has always been all there is, for Vanya. It’s all she’s ever had. It’s the only thing that’s ever been hers.

(It isn’t that she can’t hear the violin. It’s that she can’t hear it right. She hears it muffled, and only with her left ear. The right ear—the deafened one—isn’t the one closest to the violin, but the sudden loss of phonetic clarity stills throws her off balance. And the music she _can_ hear—well, that’s different too. She hears it in waves. She hears it in light.)

(It’s too different.)

 

Aimee calls back, just after lunch.

She says: “Vanya?”

Vanya presses the phone close to her ear. “Hi?”

“Oh, good! I wasn’t sure I’d catch you.” Aimee’s voice is light, genuine. Vanya shifts uncomfortably. Where else would she be?

“Uh,” says Vanya. “Is everything alright?” _Vanya, you idiot, let her speak._

Aimee laughs, warbling through the phone line. “Yeah, yeah. We all got out, you know, mostly unharmed. Bethy twisted her ankle, won’t shut up about it.” She says the words fondly, as though it’s endearing. “Crazy, though, isn’t it?”

Vanya’s insides twist around in knots, saying _your fault._ “Yeah.”

“Did you get out okay, though? I couldn’t find you. No one could.”

 “Mostly unharmed, yeah.”

Aimee asks Vanya if she wants to meet up for lunch, says some of the orchestra members like to go together when recital is earlier in the day. This lunch won’t be after recital, though. This lunch is so they can hold hands and feel each other’s pulses, sit too closely together and remind each other that they’re safe. They can say _crazy, isn’t it?_ and mean _it was terrifying and I’ve been sleeping with the lights on._ Aimee doesn’t say any of that and Vanya tries not to think about how her first invitation comes after she nearly ended the world.

Vanya says lunch sounds nice.

 

The doctor’s waiting room is white, white, white. Vanya tries to sit as small as possible, bunched together with her arms pulled in. She feels vulnerable, here. Dissectible.

There’s a little boy, snot-faced, who waves at her. She has to remind herself how to wave back, peeling her fingers away from her arms, and he beams at her.

“Vanya Hargreeves?” Vanya takes a breath. Stands up.

Her doctor keeps coming back to an acronym. Noise-Induced Hearing Loss: NIHL. Vanya tells her about her the gunshot, about the ringing that comes and goes, about the way that she can’t hear people properly if they aren’t close to her, about the way that human traffic sounds muffled, underwater-soft and indistinguishable.

The doctor says: _Are you interested in hearing aids?_ Vanya says she isn’t sure. _Would you be interested in a list of resources? Maybe some beginner’s ASL classes? These things can be easier to process with company._ Vanya says she’s taking them already. 

And then, because she cant’s stop thinking about, just before the appointment is supposed to end, Vanya tells the doctor about the pills. The doctor asks her to come back in a few days for blood tests, maybe even scanning.  _No child should have been on this medication, Miss Hargreeves._

It’s funny, in a way. She hadn’t seen Reginald Hargreeves in over a decade, and yet—and _yet_ —she never once stopped taking those pills. It was a learned response: she used to get punished when she didn’t take them, and then she moved out and the punishment wasn’t applicable, but the fear remained. She loves Mom but she’s never trusted her like the others do. She’d never been able to forget about the metal underneath her skin.

Vanya walks into the doctor’s office with shaking hands. She leaves with a diagnosis and a promise to return.

(The doctor mentioned other things, too. Gave her pamphlets on medicinal withdrawal and told her to see a therapist, to figure out if the ever-present anger is symptomatic of something else. She suggests maybe looking into bipolar disorder if the emotional upheaval doesn’t fade. Says _there’s nothing wrong in seeking help, Vanya._ )  

 

Five finds her, because of course he does. He grabs her arm and pulls to the side when she’s walking to the grocery store, tired of her empty fridge. (The doctor said the pills could have a lot of negative side-effects she should have been told about. Heart conditions, sexual dysfunction, weight loss, loss of appetite… it’s been hours and Vanya’s heart is still racing.)

“Vanya,” Five hisses. She isn’t sure if he’s angry or worried. Worried for the world, probably, and angry at her. She gently pulls her arm from his grasp.

“Five,” she greets, polite. He’s still wearing that stupid uniform.

“Where the hell have you been?”

Vanya shrugs. He narrows his eyes. “New place,” she explains. He’d have figured it out anyway. Only a matter of time. “I’m going shopping. You can come, if you want.” She thinks he’s going to disappear, disgusted with her, or worse—he’ll drag her with him, back to the house. Back to the cage. No, no, he wouldn’t do that.

Instead, he says: “Shopping for what?”

“Groceries,” answers Vanya, and then realises that Five probably hasn’t gone shopping for groceries before. (It’s a sobering thought. He's... he's her brother. She thinks if she dwells too long on the way his life was stolen from him— _by her—_ she'll collapse and never get up again.)

Five comes with. He keeps a wary gaze trained on her the whole time, looking at her from the corner of his eyes. She ignores it, sticking to the basics and filling up her basket. Bread, green tea, bananas. Five grabs a bag of marshmallows. She adds a red knitted sweater and a grey collared shirt, so he doesn’t have to stick to the uniform if he doesn’t want to. Dad never gave them any choices, but Five deserves them, now.

On the way home, he has to pull her out of the way twice when someone nearly walks into her. She didn’t hear them, too focused on watching him. He shakes his head at her, confused and exasperated, but not angrily so. She doesn't offer him any explanations, but he doesn't seem to care for any. 

Once they’re inside her apartment, Vanya places the groceries on the table and fills up the kettle, looking over her shoulder to check if he’s said anything she didn't catch. “Feel free to make yourself comfortable,” she says, gesturing at the couch, and he tilts his head in acknowledgment. He doesn’t sit, though, choosing instead to walk around the room and poke his head through the door to her bedroom, peeking into the bathroom, trailing his fingers along the locked windowsills and looking up at the fairy lights with a thoughtful expression.

She watches him, and then pours the hot water into two mugs: green tea for her, black tea for him. She doesn’t know if he drinks tea, or how he likes it, but it’ll have to do. Vanya doesn’t keep coffee at home; it didn’t react well to her medicine. Her mouth tightens. She takes the mugs over to the couch, lowering herself down and curling her legs underneath herself.

Five joins her and she reaches over to give him his mug. “So,” he says, after immediately putting the mug down. “Why the sudden move? Surely you didn’t think I wouldn’t be able to find you.” There’s always an undercurrent of condescension to his words. She misses Five when he really was thirteen, who was brash and rude but kind when it came down to it.

 _I didn’t want to stay in my apartment because Leonard was there for like three days._ That sounds ridiculous. She’s blowing things out of proportion. _It felt tainted. It felt unsafe._ She’s overthinking. 

“I don’t know,” Vanya says instead, looking into her tea. (She silences the crueler part of herself, which wants to remind him that she has an ordinary life to return to, unlike the other siblings. It's not true, anyway.) Steam rises up, brushing her nose.

Five is raising an eyebrow when she looks up. He’s mid-sentence. She cuts him off: “Are you going to make me go back, Five?”

He blinks, taken aback. Maybe because she interrupted him. “Well,” he says slowly. “Would you really not come back if I asked you to?”

Vanya shakes her head, squaring her jaw. Five looks at her, something heavy and pensive in his gaze. “Then I guess not,” he says quietly. She has to strain to hear the current of his words, focussing on his mouth as he forms the words. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean for the house to be a cage, Vanya.”

Vanya frowns, takes a tiny sip of her tea. “That’s all the Academy ever was,” she says, and maybe that’s harsh but she doesn’t feel anything when she says it. It’s only the truth. 

“We still have to figure out how to fix you,” Five warns her. “Everyone is at risk.”

Vanya feels the muscles in her jaw twitch. _I am not a bomb. I am not something to be fixed._ “Well, figure that out here. I’m not going back to the house.”

He doesn’t stay very long after that. His tea remains untouched, but he takes the sweater and the shirt. Vanya would like to think it’s a start.

* * *

 

It’s Tuesday evening. Vanya is making pasta and humming to herself. She’s trying to make herself comfortable with the wonky way she hears the music. Acclimatisation, accommodation, adaptation. Things will get better.

She sits, with her dinner, and thinks very long and very hard about her future. She’s going to go to recital tomorrow. She’s not going to be perfect, but she’ll explain what happened and the conductor will be understanding, will say she can give it a go and if it doesn’t work she can just bump straight back down into the background. It’ll sting a bit, but it’s hardly the end of the world.

 

She doesn’t go to recital.

She stays home, curled up on the couch, blankets draped across her body. She tries to remember how to breathe. It was something small that sent her spiralling: she’d sent her alarm clock, then she didn’t hear it go off in the morning and woke up disorientated. She cries into her hands for hours and covers her ears so she can pretend the silence is a choice.

Then it’s mid-afternoon and Vanya pulls herself off the couch and into a pair of jeans, stiff-jointed and numb, tired in the way that follows an excess of tears. She goes to a craft store and buys paint, watercolour and acrylic and oil pastels, and when she comes home she spreads paper across the ground and tries to make something from the blankness in front of her.

She covers the white in sprawling, watery hills, like she’d always dreamed of visiting when she was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, growing up in a house that felt like a cage. She isn’t an artist, it’s messy and ugly and imperfect but Vanya _needs_ messy and ugly and imperfect today. (Tomorrow, she’ll start to look at videos, at how-to’s: she’ll practice flowers and sunshine and smiles with instruction, and she’ll hang the pictures she likes up on the walls. Tomorrow isn’t today.)

Today isn’t about instruction, about what she knows. It’s about creation. It’s Vanya, on her knees, bare-legged, paint splattered on her skin. It’s paper drenched in bleeding colours, swirling together. It’s Vanya, in a darkening apartment she’s still getting used to, reminding herself that she’s alive.

And then it’s dark and it's night and she hasn’t eaten anything all day, and there are pictures spread out in front of her. She leans back on her knees, shirt ruined, skin covered. Her hands are a collage, her hair’s a mess. There are trees and flowers and cities before her, rough-lined and jagged, blurry and unrefined. There are faces: Helen, in the corner of a painted room. Mom, sitting by a field.

She stumbles into bed without showering, dead-tired, yawning. For a day, she could almost forget. Acclimatisation, accommodation, adaptation. Things will get better. They will. They  _will._

 

Lunch is the next day. Aimee greets her outside the café with a smile and excited voice, but not a hug, and Vanya is grateful for it. She’s introduced to the others, though she already knows them by their faces: Malcolm who plays cello, third-chair violinist Bethy, Lyn and Josiah who play clarinet, Luca on flute.

They sit crowded around a table, sipping coffee and laughing at inside jokes, at ease with each other, comfortable in a way Vanya doesn’t understand but feels a pang of longing for. Malcolm keeps asking her questions and Bethy keeps pulling her into conversation, and when Vanya isn’t part of the discussion she doesn’t fade out entirely. Aimee sits beside her and their arms touch.

After the group has started dispersing, Aimee walks outside with her. “You know,” she says, and brushes a strand of her thick, short black hair behind one ear, “we always thought you just didn’t want to engage with us. I’m really glad you came today.”

She’s wearing a red leather jacket that matches her lipstick, and there’s a tattoo of a flower from the Philippines on her wrist. “The invite still stands, if you’re interested? I had a really good time today.”

Before they part ways, Aimee gives Vanya her number. “Don’t lose it,” she says, grinning, and Vanya promises she won’t. Her cheeks feel warm.

 

On the way home, she picks up a batch of apples.

Maria looks unimpressed with Vanya’s offering of a too-crispy pie when she answers the knock on her door.

“To say thank you,” Vanya tries to explain, already regretting it.

Maria wrinkles her nose and pats Vanya’s cheek. “By trying to poison me? No,” she replies. “I will teach you how to make a proper pie. Then you can thank me.”

Vanya blinks in surprise. There’s a funny feeling in her chest, like Luther’s squeezing her rib cage too tightly, but it doesn’t hurt. Her soul feels abruptly too big for her bones, like it’s trying to burst through the confines of her skin.

The sun sets, days after the world almost ended, and Vanya stands next to her landlady and rolls out golden dough while Maria hums a song and shows her how to core an apple.

She’s supposed to be practicing things she should have learned at recital, but she isn’t. She’s shouldn’t have left her siblings without an explanation, but she did. She’s deafened. She’s learning. Things will get better.

* * *

 

There’s a boy she used to teach violin to. His name is Zeke, he’s sixteen and he’s got some kind of family trouble that Vanya finds too easy to understand. Violin isn’t his passion, but he _enjoyed_ learning with her, enjoyed the company and the way she lets things happen at their own pace.  

He knocks on her door in the morning, and shrugs when she asks how he found her. “Zeke,” she says gently, “I… _can’t_ teach violin anymore.” 

He looks over at her still-standing case with a raised eyebrow. Vanya winces.

“There was an incident,” she says with a sigh, watching him scrape his plate clean of leftover apple pie. “I’m partially deaf. Hard of hearing. I'm not sure, it hasn’t been fully checked out yet.”

“Damn,” says Zeke. “You should probably get that checked out, then.” She smiles at him, because he’s always been like that. “Can you help me write essays?”

“Zeke,” she chides.

He flops back onto the couch. “Look, Vanya,” he says, “I learn well with you. You’re a good teacher.” She isn’t. “And, you know, home sucks, so.” He blows air out loudly through his lips. “And I’m failing English.” Another pause. “You did write a book, didn’t you?”

 

(“I can’t believe I let that happen,” says Vanya, once he’s left with the promise to return in a couple days for assistance with an English essay. Free of charge, obviously, because Vanya really isn’t a teacher and Zeke doesn’t really need one, no matter what he says. 

What Zeke needs is guidance. She isn’t the person to guide him—her only human parent fucked her up in so many ways it isn’t funny—but he doesn’t have anyone else.

She can’t turn him away.

And over the next few days, as more of her ex-students come knocking at her door, she can’t turn them away either. It’s just a few of them, the older ones, the teenagers, who all have stories and histories and things they want to run from or towards. Nisha asks if she knows how to write poetry. Jordan wants help writing song lyrics, Tess is failing half her classes, and Vanya can’t turn them away. Of course she can’t.)

 

In the afternoon, when Vanya’s trying to figure out how much water is supposed to be used for watercolours, someone knocks on her door. It’s Aimee. She’s holding sheet notes.

“You didn’t come to recital,” she says in explanation, “can I come in?” Vanya opens the door wider.

An uncomfortable silence falls over them quickly, sitting uncertainly on Vanya’s couch, Aimee taking in the disarray with wide eyes—messy paintings stuck on cabinets in the kitchen, all too colourful to be tasteful, all the fairy lights in the apartment blinking warmly, pages of typing strewn across the table. There’s paint on Vanya’s hands. She wipes them on her pants self-consciously.

“Vanya, what’s going on?”

Vanya steels herself. She takes a breath. She could lie.

“At the concert, a gun fired off near my head,” she says instead. “I’ve partially lost my hearing. I don’t think I can play in the orchestra, at least not now.” She shrugs. There’s a lump in her throat. This is all too much, too soon.

Aimee makes a soft, pained noise. She reaches over and takes Vanya’s hand, but Vanya flinches and Aimee pulls it back. There’s no pity on her face, just empathy, and Vanya knows Aimee understands what she’s really saying. Aimee plays viola in the same orchestra, after all. This is Vanya’s whole life— _was_ her whole life.

“God,” says Aimee, after a long silence. The word warbles, because Vanya isn’t looking at her. “I’m so _sorry_ , Vanya. Can I… help?”

“Oh,” responds Vanya, still struggling past the blockade in her throat, suddenly trying not to cry. She tries to find courage. “There isn’t really, you know, anything to be done.”

When Aimee leaves the apartment, she pulls Vanya into a hug. It’s brief, which is good because Vanya’s pulse immediately spikes, but it’s tight and in a way it’s grounding. “I’m here,” says Aimee, very fiercely and very determined. “I want to be here for you, okay? You don’t have to do this on your own.” Vanya flushes, working through the surprise accompanying Aimee’s words, but she manages to nod and Aimee exhales like she’s glad.

(The third time they go out for lunch, Aimee greets her with _hi, how are you:_ one hand waving out from her forehead, two cupped hands swinging up in a half-circle, then pointing forward. Vanya smiles so hard she can feel it for hours after.)

 

The conductor leaves her a message. He tells her to let him know if or when she feels ready to return to music, if there’s any way he can help her or make things easier.

She doesn’t reply. Not yet, at least. She doesn’t know what to say.

* * *

 

It’s Friday, and Allison must be back by now. Luther, too, but Vanya doesn’t want to think of that because then she’ll think of how it felt to strangle against his chest, about the cage, about him coming to find her and drag her back.

She’s a little surprised Allison hasn’t come bursting through her door yet. Allison has never been good with boundaries. But maybe—maybe Five hasn’t told them where she is. Maybe he’s doing this one thing for her, to give her this. Time, space.

Klaus finds her by noon, though, so maybe not. “Vanya!” He beams at her when she opens the door, her hair pulled back into a messy bun. Zeke just left.

She doesn’t say anything. Klaus’ face falls, just a fraction, but he breezes past her into the apartment like it didn't happen.

“Cute place,” he says, as though he means it, spinning slowly in place with his hands in his pockets, taking in the lights and the art and the smell of burning cookies.

“Klaus,” she says, and her voice is tiny. He turns to face her, expectant, and she forces herself to be brave. “Why are you here?”

Klaus shrugs, smiling again. “Can’t a man visit his baby sister?”

“I’m as old as you,” Vanya mumbles. Klaus’s face shutters again. Vanya feels concern stirring up within her, though she doesn’t want to feel it. Klaus is, just a bit, like a black hole: if she starts to think about all the reasons to be concerned about him, she’ll never stop.

“You actually, really aren’t,” he says, and Vanya finds herself believing him, though it makes no sense. He sounds honest. He flaps his hand at her. “And don’t worry, Five didn’t tell any of the others where you’ve been hiding.” She blinks in surprise. So Five _is_ keeping her secrets, then. She isn’t sure how to feel about that. Grateful, but suspicious too. Why? For how long? To what ends? 

“Why’d he send you?”

“Oh, Vanya.” Klaus really does sound tired, then, and sad. His wandering eyes find hers. “Is it really so hard to believe I just wanted to check on you?"

Vanya flushes and shrinks into herself. There’s a silence. “No, Klaus.” She means it, too. “I’m sorry.”

Klaus waves it off like nothing happened. “So, what’s up with all the—” He waves around, at the lights, the art in varying stages of dryness, at the new place, the blankets on the couch (they’re weighted) and the paintbrushes she keeps leaving in odd places.

Vanya shrugs and moves past him, still keeping an eye on his face so she can see what he says when he moves out of her range. She doesn't really have an answer for him. 

“You feel up to eating something?” She means is he in withdrawal, when he can’t keep anything down, or is he high, when he’s alternatively very picky or craving anything. Klaus brightens, clapping his hands, and follows her into the kitchen. She pulls leftover pie from the fridge while he hoists himself up onto the tiny counter and swings his legs, watching her and looking around curiously. All the things she’s hung up in the kitchen are bright, loud, colourful—Klaus has always been like that. He fits right in. 

He claps again when she hands him a plate, and he gasps. “Vanya, did you _make_ this _yourself_?” She nods, amused, and leans against the counter across from him, tucking her arms into her sides.

She wonders if Ben is here right now. She remembers him, faintly, from the first time everything went to shit at the concert. She thinks she’ll ask, but not now—Klaus looks almost content, swinging his legs and closing his eyes as he chews.

“I didn’t know you could bake,” he tells her, mouth full.

Vanya laughs a bit, despite herself. “I can’t,” she tells him. He makes an offended noise, pointing to the pie, and she can feel herself smiling. “I’m learning,” she amends, and he makes an impressed sound.

She isn’t an idiot. She knows Klaus is here for something. And she knows he’s not stupid, either—the others often dismissed him, but she knows that there’s a spark in his mind that Reginald could never snuff out entirely. And when Klaus is sober, like he appears to be now, it becomes even clearer. He’s watching her. Not in the way Five does, or Diego does, like she’s a bomb about to explode, but like he’s looking for something.

Then Vanya checks the time. She wanted to go to the community centre again tonight, for a scrapbooking class. She doesn’t have anything to scrapbook. Klaus sees her looking, quirks his head at her. “Somewhere you gotta be?”

Vanya shakes her head. He pouts, sensing a lie, and she shrugs, trying to look like she doesn’t care. She doesn’t like being so off-balance. Her siblings have always been like that, though, leaving her uncertain as to what’s expected. At least Klaus is predictable in his unpredictability. “Um, I was thinking about going to a, a, art class? At the community centre.” Klaus looks at her for a moment, and she can practically see his mind moving. Then he brightens.

“Cool, can I come?”

“Oh, Klaus, that’s not—”

He cuts her off. “I want to.” His voice is earnest. “I want to go to an art class with you, Vanya. It’ll be fun!” His moments of seriousness are always interspersed with his eccentricity, and she listens to him babble and thinks _well, I mean. Why not?_

 

They miss the scrapbooking class, because Klaus got distracted by a store with candles and Vanya ended up buying a few incense sticks and candles for the apartment, and then Klaus stopped to pet every single dog they passed, and then Vanya introduced him to a fancy art store she’d admired three times already. 

The pottery class is about to start, though, and Klaus looks so genuinely excited that Vanya doesn’t even think about going home. The class is mostly older couples and little kids, plus a few teenagers who seem like they’re slightly embarrassed to be there. But it’s _fun_. Klaus covers his hands in clay, slapping each block onto the pottery wheel like he’s an abstract artist. He’s loose with his moments, free, while Vanya’s too perfectionistic with each of her little pots and half of them end up caving in when her thumbs press too hard. Klaus laughs every time.

By the end of the class, Vanya has dried clay smeared onto her cheeks and crusted under her nails, and Klaus’s tattoos have become so dusty they’re hard to read. The instructor looks at them with fond exasperation, undoubtedly confused by the mousy woman and her flamboyant companion, telling them to come back on Monday to pick up their pots. That works out perfectly, because Vanya’s going to be at the signing class on Monday. (She's been practicing. _Brother:_  both hands in an L-shape, one raised up to the forehead and then coming down on top of the other, pointer fingers outward.) 

When they’re walking out of the class, Klaus’s arm linked through hers (her pulse is almost calm, her heart almost still) she catches sight of a familiar face. Mia sees her at the same moment and brightens, signs  _hello_ with a quick salute off from her forehead, mid-sentence to some teenager. Vanya waves.

Klaus doesn’t seem to notice. If he does, he doesn't say anything. 

He walks her all the way home and then says he’d better head back. To the Academy, to the others. 

“Oh,” says Vanya, and her stomach drops. It’s stupid, because earlier she just wanted him to leave but now she’s anxious at the thought. She takes a breath. “You don’t have to, if you don’t want to?” She has a spare couch. He could stay.

He chuckles. “Let’s not try too much, too fast, hm? I’m quite a lot to handle, sister mine, I wouldn't want to overwhelm you.”

Vanya frowns at him. “You wouldn’t.” She makes sure she says it firmly, so he can believe it.

His face goes soft, and he pulls his lips to one side in a pout. “Oh, Vanya. It was a good day.” It was. “I won’t tell the others where you are. Not until—or if—you want to.”

Vanya pulls him into a hug, staying very still, and she feels his long arms come to rest lightly around her shoulders. He’s so tall, and so thin. “Thank you,” she mumbles against his chest. Not just for the promise of secrecy, but the day. For not pushing. For being Klaus, kind and wild-eyed and struggling.

(She thinks she knows why Five sent him to her. His hands shake. His eyes are very wide. She isn’t sure what he experienced during the apocalypse week, but something happened, and she can see it written in the lines of his body. And if not, well, withdrawal can’t be fun in the Academy. Maybe he needs help, too.) 

 

He comes back on Sunday. She’s lit the candles. She bought a pack of tarot cards, just in case—they used to help, back when he was younger and so afraid of what he hadn’t learned to block out. Maybe they can help him now, too. 

He’s already walking in the door as she opens it, and she can’t find it in her to be upset by his lack of boundaries—unlike Allison, Klaus invades her personal space simply because his is so encompassing. He doesn’t seem to have any ulterior motives: he’s just, by nature, a social creature.

They go out again, Vanya with her sweater pulled down to cover her fingers so she’s nearly drowning in it, Klaus with his painted nails and eyeliner. This time, they buy plants. Klaus picks the plants with long leaves and bright colours, Vanya looking for the ones with the nicest Latin names: _Asparagus setaceus_ makes Klaus pull a face, _Pachira aquatic_ for its twisted trunks _,_ peace lillies, calathea, aloe, jade plants, bight bromeliads and kalanchoe. The employees at the plant store give them a pair of wooden crates so they can carry the pots back to Vanya’s place, saying nothing about the way Vanya is swamped by her clothes or the shadows under her eyes, the way Klaus jitters or his constant stream of chatter. On the way home, they practice sounding out the names, stretching them out and pulling them apart like bubblegum until Klaus nearly walks into someone from how hard he’s laughing, both of their arms straining under the weight but their dirty hands holding firm. 

One of the store’s two employees was a woman with dyed hair, bright green and wavy. She had tattoos peeking out from under her shirt sleeves and collar, draping over her fingers and sweeping up behind her ear. Vanya finds a phone number on the back of her receipt, written in sparkly pink pen and accompanied by a smiley face:  _call me!_ Klaus’s eyes crinkle at their sides when he catches sight of it. Vanya crumples it up, but the look doesn’t leave his eyes: kind of happy, a bit pitying. He looks at her like she knows what she's thinking, but he doesn't, he doesn't. 

They place the plants all over the apartment, along the windowsills, on the kitchen counter, beside the little TV Vanya rarely uses and on nearly every surface they can find, almost all of them situated perfectly in patches of sunshine. Klaus dances as he does, pots cradled in his too-thin arms, twirling from wall to wall. The candles are lit, one by one, and after the plants have all been situated Vanya looks through her new recipe book (courtesy of Maria) for an easy recipe while Klaus flips through the deck of cards, almost scarily focused on whatever they're showing him.

When he leaves, he kisses her cheek. Vanya presses her hands flat against her thighs, but she still flinches backwards. 

* * *

Monday morning finds her dancing in her living room. Her feet are bare and the cold of the wooden floor grounds her to reality, her hair pulled messily back as she spins in circles with her eyes closed.

She’s not really sure what she’s doing. Whatever it is, it’s not what she’s ever done before—Vanya’s bad at dancing, she always has been, but now she’s loud about it, free, her limbs loose and uncoordinated and she nearly crashes into wall because she’s moving around so much.

She spends three hours on the couch, imitating ASL introductory videos until her wrists start to ache. Aimee stops by to say hello, and she tells Vanya that her charred cookies are good even though Vanya knows they aren’t. (So why does she blush?) She spends half the afternoon in a bookshop, buying way too many books that she can’t afford, especially now that she isn't working at the orchestra. When she was younger, before the violin swallowed her whole, she used to read all the time, the same novels over and over again until she could recite entire chapters off by heart.  

She and Ben used to trade books, back and forth, leaving little comments for each other on scraps of paper. Five joined in sometimes, but he always liked the bigger books on physics and science, not the books she and Ben obsessed over, classics and adventures and poetry: all things Reginald didn’t care much for, and they jumped into because it was the only escape available. They would sit together whenever they could, not talking except to lean over and point at a particularly nice phrase. 

After Ben died, Vanya stopped reading. (At home, on the couch, in the sunlight, it takes her a few seconds before she can open the first book’s cover. Then she dives in, head first, and when she remerges a few hours later she’s halfway through already and she’d almost forgotten about the silence in her ears. When she’s reading, she doesn’t need to hear what’s happening around her.)

 

At the community centre, Monday evening, Vanya walks into the room used for the ASL class and doesn’t think she could shrink if she tried to. Felix reaches up to bump fists with her while _Ant_ shows _Oma_  a video of his youngest daughter at her birthday party, Mia flies over to ask about the man she’d seen Vanya with and signs at the same pace, the teenagers both raise their hands in greeting, and comfort settles warm and unfamiliar against Vanya’s skin.

She ends up telling them about her violin, and the way its sound has changed so irreversibly that she isn't sure she'll ever be able to touch it again. There isn’t even a flash of pity in their faces, only naked understanding and raw empathy. Vanya feels so grateful she could cry.

Mia says once they all get used to signing, she wants to arrange group café outings, to practice fluid conversation—Vanya finds herself feeling _motivated,_ eager, excited for something in a way she isn't used to. Before she stopped the pills ( _the poison)_ almost nothing made it through her wall of numbness. Now, she thinks of home and she thinks: comfort, plants, candles and paint and soft golden lights. She thinks of Mia and the ASL group, of Aimee and the way her smiles transform her face, of the messages left on her phone from various members of the orchestra group, of Maria’s wrinkled hands adjusting Vanya’s in the kitchen.

She thinks of the future and it isn’t quite so lonely anymore, not quite so sad or scary. But really, well, the biggest change in Vanya is that she thinks of the future at all.

* * *

 

Klaus comes knocking at her door before the sun has properly raised into the sky, clouds still pink-white and crisp morning air blowing in with him when he waltzes inside, already chattering at her. 

He drapes himself on the couch, feet kicked up, and she shuffles quickly over to the kitchen to fetch their pottery, freshly collected from the community centre. The pots and mugs Klaus made look just like him. They’re wonky and lopsided, too tall and swelling in and out like ridges. Some curve too much to one side and some are too skinny at the top, and Vanya can’t even look at them without smiling. They’re glazed in all sorts of colours, smearing together in a sort of pseudo-psychedelic explosion, and Klaus’s expression goes so bright when he sees them that he nearly glows.

She lines them up in front of him, on the little table in front of the couch, and he coos as he examines them one by one. “Where are yours?”

She blinks. “Oh, they’re back in the kitchen.” She doesn’t like hers nearly as much as his, but they’re not bad either, painted single colours and all fairly similar looking, somewhat shapeless. 

Klaus clucks his tongue, waving his hands at her: “Well, go get them, I want to see them—can I see them?”

Her lips quirk up to one side, touched despite herself and exasperated at his characteristic exuberance. “Sure,” she agrees, half-hearing the mirth in her voice, and she pushes herself up off the ground to head back over to the kitchen and pull them out of her cabinets.

She turns around when she’s pulled her little pots down onto the counter, but she must have missed Klaus saying something to her because he’s standing, now, and he’s moved forwards a few steps, and there’s something in his hands. His mouth is moving, and she catches him mouth her name, a question. _Vanya?_  His eyes are hurting and worried, but his face still looks like he's trying to seem carefree. Confused, she glances down at what he’s holding. There’s a pamphlet from the doctor’s office—the one about NIHL, hearing loss, her brain supplies instinctively—and along with it it, under Klaus’ dark nails, _ASL For Beginners._

“Don’t tell the others,” she blurts out, and then winces. She can’t lie about it, now. That was as clear a confession as she could have given. But, thinking about it briefly, she isn’t sure that she would want to lie, anyway. It’s not as though she’s entirely deaf, (though, well, she’s not really that far off) and it’s not as though Klaus had been the one to lock her up in the basement in a soundproof cage.

The soundproof cage that had blocked out everything except the sound of Vanya’s heartbeat, until it was all she could hear, kind of like what’s happening now, Klaus’ mouth still moving but Vanya unable to hear him whatsoever, and she’d been alone and she’d been so scared and she’d thought she was going to die and they would have left her down there, all of them, they just turned around and walked away and they would have left her down there forever with only the sound of her racing heart and she would have died there, she would have died— she can feel, distantly, the way she’s hyperventilating. Her hands are shaking so violently that they feel numb, and there isn’t any sound, and everything is too much, too much, too much.  

She doesn’t see Klaus rush towards her or hear his words and his nonsensical soothing noises or the hurt little sounds he makes when she can’t respond to them. She does feel him try and pull her into a hug but _no no no_ she lashes out desperately, pushing him away with her forearms and her elbows, keeping him off of her and sending her crashing down onto the floor in the frenzy of terror that clouded her mind when she felt his arms encircle her.

He crouches down, she can sense it distantly, and then he’s pulling her hands away from her ears—when did they get there? —and uncurling her fingers, placing her palm flat against his chest. Her shoulders are still heaving up and down with the frantic pace of her breathing, but Klaus is steady and still under her hand, and his heartbeat can’t be heard but she can feel it, a bit too fast maybe but it’s rhythmic and monotonous and Vanya’s whole world narrows until there is only her and the wooden floor under her, Klaus and the heartbeat she feels under her palm.

It takes her a while to calm down. Her cheeks, she realises, are wet. Her hearing starts to come back. Klaus is humming, entirely calm and still, still holding her hand against his body. “Sorry,” she croaks, when she feels she can speak.

He squeezes her hand, and she glances up at his lips, but he doesn’t say anything. When her breathing has steadied and the world is starting to come back into focus, and she feels so tired and worn out that she just wants to sleep, he pulls her up to her feet and leads her over to the couch. She sits, numb, and he bustles around her—into the kitchen, opening her cabinets until he finds her tea bags, and then around to the candles and lighting them with fingers that only tremble a bit, and then back to the kitchen to pour hot water into two mugs, dropping the tea bags into the cups and blowing on them uncertainly. 

He comes back, eventually, after what could have been ten seconds or ten minutes. He presses the tea into her hands, waiting until he’s sure that she’s steady enough to hold it before letting go of the mug.

Then he sits down on the opposite end of the couch, curling his painted nails around his own mug, and waits patiently for her to speak.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pls review friends :) comments motivate me!! also if u have suggestions or requests feel free to hit me up with those!!!! ily


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH FOR YOUR SUPPORT!! I've cried over the fifty-nine (59!) comments literally like 4 times. I love u all. 
> 
> idk how I feel about this chapter? but I hope you enjoy it!

The night that Klaus finds out that Vanya’s deaf, she finds out that he went to Vietnam.

Hargreeves children don’t do things like bond over traumas or share nightmares, but they’re sitting on the same couch and Vanya’s cheeks still bear tear tracks and Klaus hasn’t stopped shaking for what might be days, now. Their father never taught them to love each other. They have to figure that out on their own.

Klaus nearly cries when Vanya tells him that the last thing she’ll have heard in its entirety is a gunshot, about the way she’ll never again hear her violin perfectly. He asks, timidly, if she’s always been so averse to touch, and then Vanya is crying, too, her brother’s hands hovering helplessly because he’s too worried that he’ll will make it worse. She tells him about the way Luther held his arms out for her and then squeezed the air out her lungs, smothering her, drowning her as she wept.

She tells him about the rest of it, too, the anger that doesn’t ever leave because her whole life has been a _lie_ and she can never get those years of numbness back, she’ll never know what she may have discovered were she not _ordinary._ How far does _you think you’re just ordinary_ even go, anyway? She tells him about the doctor’s suggestions, about the whisperings of mood disorders or heart conditions and brain scans and blood samples, all these things she’s unearthing that she wishes would have just stayed buried.

And in return Klaus tells her about men he knew who lost their hearing after months of helicopters and bombs and screaming, about the jungle he learned to fear and the way he became accustomed to feeling a gun in his hands. He tells her about Dave, with a far-off look in his eyes and wet cheeks, his voice so soft that Vanya has to move closer to hear him. He tells her about falling in love. He tells her about losing the one he loved.

“I’m so sorry that I left you there,” he tells her, with a hoarse voice. It’s dark outside. He’s talking about the cage in the basement, the chamber of silence with protruding walls. His fingers wring the fuzzy blanket strewn over Vanya’s legs. His mouth twists, trying to think of what to say, what excuses to forego. “I know—I know—” She reaches over and touches his leg. He looks at her hand and she starts to pull it back but his hand comes up quickly to cover her own, staring at their layered fingers. “Dad used to lock me in the mausoleum,” He says suddenly, the words all jumbled up and bursting out of him. “So I mean, I knew, I knew what it felt like, and, and. He trapped us both in cages, and. I shouldn’t have left you there. I know, I know Luther was the main, um, the main instigator, but I won’t even pretend that the rest of us aren’t to blame too because we could have said more, we could have done more, we could have tried harder but we didn’t and I didn’t and I’m sorry, Vanya, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Vanya shuffles forward, on her knees, and then she slots herself into his side, resting her head on his shoulder. His hands jolt, flying up and then down on his lap, and then they jitter sideways to rest next to hers, resting on the discarded blanket.

She doesn’t say it’s okay, because it’s not. “I knew about the mausoleum,” she whispers, instead of lying to him. Klaus’ head shifts as he looks at her, but she doesn’t look up at him. Her fingers curl into the blanket. “I asked him to stop, said you’d never learn anything but fear from it, but he didn’t care. I don’t think he really wanted you to learn anything from it anyway. It was all just… control, with him. That’s all he cared about.”

She can feel the way Klaus’ body shudders beside her, choking on a sob that stays strapped in his chest. He laughs, then, defeated and watery. “Of course it was, good old Reggie,” he agrees, and Vanya’s mouth presses into a line because that’s not better, it’s not better that he’s laughing, not when it sounds like that.

“I forgive you,” she whispers, and he shudders again, one hand lifting towards his face to cover his eyes, trembling. “He didn’t ruin us, Klaus. We made mistakes but we’re learning. We’re not him. I forgive you.”

 

They watch the sky turn from blue and black to indigo, to pink and yellow and lilac, leaning on each other on Vanya’s couch. By the time the sun emerges from behind the curtain of nightfall, Vanya feels worn out and washed out, somehow reborn. Rebirthed, maybe. It’s poetic, in a sense, that Klaus is by her side this time.

Klaus shows her signs he learned in Vietnam over breakfast, _left_ and _right_ and _help._ He only ever learned the functional, militaristic signs necessary in a warzone, but his gaze is fiery and determined when he tells her he wants to learn ASL, for real, for her.

“Okay,” she says softly, and his smile transforms his face, happy and crinkling.

This time, when he kisses her cheek goodbye, she barely flinches at all. She pulls him into a hug, hands fisted in the back of his shirt, pulling him close. She’s trying to hold onto hope that he’ll come back, that he isn’t just going to disappear into the streets. Or, maybe worse, that he’ll return with Allison or Luther or Diego, that she’ll walk into her apartment to find them waiting for her with angry eyes and too-strong arms. She wants to believe that a night of curling into each other on a couch means things will change, really she does, but… she knows better.

Klaus presses another kiss to the top of her head. “We can do this, okay? You’re not alone anymore.” She nods against his chest, just to placate him, and feels torn between _things can change_ and _but they won’t._

Then the apartment is empty and it’s only her, standing in the middle of her living room, with her arms cradling her body. It’s all just… so much. Klaus wants to try, she can see that. He wants to do better, to start over, but it’s just not that _easy_. ASL is a big commitment, and _she’s_ a big commitment, and she’s been the boring sibling their whole lives and now she’s just the broken one, the bomb, the one who’s deaf and drugged and occasionally, inconsolably catastrophic. How can she expect Klaus to know how to deal with her? How can she ask that of him?

The walls are closing in on her, and her breathing is starting to stutter in her chest, so Vanya grabs her scarf and slams the door behind her.

She goes for a walk, with her cold hands shoved into her pockets and her scarf draped over her shoulders, past the swing sets and the families, past the giggly lovers holding hands, until she’s surrounded by trees and leaves, swaying slightly with the breeze. Then, when the world is quiet, Vanya opens her palms and closes her eyes. She tries to find her centre, drawing on her rudimentary knowledge of meditation and mindfulness, trying to calm her heartbeat and block out her thoughts. 

The world shrinks and shrinks, until Vanya is all there is. Then, before she can double-guess her intuition, she calls on the part of herself that she can feel shifting and moving in her consciousness, restless and ready, and feels wind brushing over her palms. She opens her eyes, and there’s wind swirling around her, but it isn’t out of control, it isn’t scary, it’s soft and beautiful and Vanya laughs in amazement because _she’s doing this_. She isn’t ordinary. She isn’t nothing, or pathetic, or useless, she’s a force of nature and it isn’t terrifying at all when it looks like this. It feels as natural as breathing. It feels more natural than anything she’s ever done, to let her mind _relax_ for once and to feel the waves of air that surround her, cocooning her in a bubble of her own creation.

Vanya was never taught to use her powers as a weapon. (She _was_ the weapon, she just didn’t know it.) She never learned how to hurt people, to kill them or to save them. All she has now is a fountain of power within her, untamed and untrained and natural. All she has is the wind, making her hair float, and the power in her hands, and the singing of the leaves. She can’t hear the not so distant traffic or the squealing children, or people when they speak to her from too far away, or her violin when she plays it, but she can hear what she’s doing. She can hear the wind as it moves away from her, expanding, swinging, sweeping over the treetops. She can feel it as it sends hats flying from heads and lovers tumbling into each other, laughing, pushing swings as children scream with joy.

She can’t hear the world, but she can hear how she affects it. She can hear the air, rushing like a stream, pulsing around her, and the gentle way it flies through the air, and underneath it all she can hear her lungs, in and out, keeping her steady. Maybe it’s not so much about hearing, with this one thing—it’s feeling. And Vanya is still learning how to feel, has only just started, but with this one thing it comes naturally.

(An anechoic chamber is the quietest place in the world. Staying there for an hour is enough to make someone go mad. And Vanya was left there for weeks as a child, then had it erased from her memory—but not the feelings of _loss_ and _unease,_ of _missing something_. The sensation of hearing nothing but yourself has only been amplified since Allison fired that shot. Vanya doesn’t think it’ll ever leave. She can still sense her body, shifting, the way her heart picks up pace when she’s scared and the expansion of her lungs in the cold air. She can hear the electric, static sense of gravity changing around her as she expels energy into the air. An anechoic chamber is the quietest place in the world, except Vanya can’t hear.)

Vanya stands in the trees, hands outstretched, head tilted up, and watches the world spinning around her through wide eyes. And then, as quickly as she released it, she draws the wind back towards her, grappling with the raw power between her fingers, pulling it back, stumbling on her feet in the sudden, terrible silence that falls upon her.

Of course she knows things won’t always be like this, won’t always be easy and intrinsic and instinctive. Her power is a weapon, she knows that, and she won’t ever forget it. She can’t, not when Five had his whole life stolen by her. But the simple fact that she’s capable of this, of small outlets of power that don’t hurt anybody, it’s enough. For the first time she can remember, Vanya doesn’t have that awful, all-consuming sense of loss and emptiness.

She stands in the clearing, hair tossed and fingertips cold, and she bends over and laughs.  

 

When she stops by the bookstore for the fourth time, the employee behind the desk asks if she’d be interested in a job. She says yes.

She calls back the conductor and says she won’t be able to return to the violin, not yet, maybe not ever, she doesn’t know. She says thank you for the call, but she can’t be first-chair anymore, and it was nice while it lasted.

 

Her sister is waiting for her, a couple streets away from the apartment. She isn’t facing Vanya’s direction, but Vanya knows she’s waiting for her, knows it like she knows that she can’t escape what comes next, no matter how badly she wants to. “Allison,” says Vanya, resigned, and her sister turns quickly to face her, hands wringing together. Her face relaxes, showing her relief, but Vanya can’t respond in kind. She’s disappointed in Klaus and in herself for believing he’d keep his word, and she just really doesn’t want to deal with Allison and her endless stream of words.

“Vanya,” Allison breathes, taking a stilted step forward and then thinking better of it. “Don’t be angry with Klaus, he only told me where to find you because I wouldn’t leave him alone.” She smiles tightly but Vanya can’t smile back.

“You rumoured him,” she says flatly, and Allison’s face twists, offended.

“No! No, Vanya, I just—asked, and he said maybe you’d be here, and—” She sounds desperate for Vanya to believe her, and Vanya averts her eyes, uncomfortable with the naked vulnerability splashed across Allison’s face.  

“Sure.” says Vanya. “What do you want?”

Allison’s face falters. She wrings her hands together, intertwining her fingers. At least Klaus didn’t tell her where the apartment is, so she can’t break in again. “Can we just… can we just talk? Please?” Her face is pleading, her eyes too emotive, and Vanya does love her sister, she does. She’s just so _tired_.

(She’s tired of trying and trying and regretting it every time. She’s tired of putting her trust in people that don’t deserve it.)

“There’s a café nearby,” she sighs, and tries not to dwell on the way Allison’s relieved smile lights up her face.

It’s only when they’re seated at a little table with big, plush velvet chairs and the waitress has disappeared with their order of one earl grey and one cappuccino that Allison starts to say whatever it is that drove her to searching Vanya out on the streets. “Vanya, please look at me.” Her voice is pleading. Vanya squeezes her eyes shut and then forces them open, meeting Allison’s concerned gaze with her own.

Allison shifts, resettling herself and tugging on her jacket with her hands like she isn’t sure what to say next. “I—I came back from visiting Claire, and you were—”

Vanya interrupts. “How is she? Claire?”

Allison blinks, thrown off, but her lips twitch in the way they always do when she thinks of her daughter. “Good, um, she’s good. Still…” She fidgets. “It’s hard, with Patrick. You know? Like, he wants to try for Claire, to give her a Mom, but, um.” She chuckles dryly, “I don’t think he’ll ever trust me again. Not that he should,” she’s quick to add, “but it’s not easy, for Claire to see her parents like this.” 

Vanya frowns in sympathy, because no matter her issues with Allison it is a terrible thig to lose your child. Or, well, custody rights of that child. She pushes down the tiny, vindictive part of her which thinks it’s only fair for Allison’s powers to blow up on her too, that this is the least that Allison deserves for manipulating her own family for years.

“I’m sorry,” she says, honestly. “That must be hard.”

Allison shoots her an empty smile and brushes it off. “But what I was saying—” The waitress comes back, balancing Allison’s coffee and Vanya’s tea, and Allison shuts her mouth in defeat.

The waitress heads off and Vanya scoops up her tea, taking a tiny sip so she doesn’t scald herself. Allison stares at her. Vanya shrinks. She really, really doesn’t want to do this. Is it so much to ask, for Allison to just leave her alone? She didn’t have a problem doing just that for the entirety of their lives before Reginald’s death.

“Look,” Allison says after a very long silence. “I just… really wanted us to be better at this.”

 

Vanya shrinks into herself, swallowed up by her long sleeves and open hair. She mutters, “I need time, Allison.”

Allison shakes her head, frowning. “But I thought things were getting better, I thought we’d aired out some of our issues, and we were going to move forward together.” What she’s really saying is: I thought you’d forgiven me. And Vanya _has_. Or, at least, she’s trying to. But what Allison doesn’t know about is also what Vanya can’t forget. She can’t tell Allison she’s deaf. She just can’t. It’s too much, it’s too scary—what if she comes home and Allison’s just sitting there, or Luther is behind the door, and Allison asks too many questions and doesn’t listen well enough and it’s just… it’s too much.

Vanya thinks about how she’d describe this to a therapist: _my sister apologised for fucking up when we were kids, and I said it was okay even though it isn’t, and now she wants to be friends. Except she fucked up recently as well, and she took my hearing. And I’m so angry about that and I’ll never be able to move past it, but she doesn’t even know, so she can’t even apologise, and really the best thing would just be for her to leave me behind and never look back, head to the stars and the glamor and people who aren’t entirely fucked in the head._

Vanya looks at her tea. This is why she hasn’t gotten a therapist.

“I need time, Allison,” She says when she finds the courage to look up again. Allison still looks like Vanya’s hurting her just by speaking, and it’s almost, _almost_ enough to make Vanya take it back and agree with whatever Allison wants.

And Vanya knows Allison wants her to do that, too. All it would take is three words, and Vanya would tell her what the real issue was, would forgive her for everything, would take Allison’s hand and be a better sister. It’s almost tempting, to be rumoured into being a better person and a better sister, but Vanya is intimately familiar with the way Allison can reconstruct someone’s identity.

Allison opens her mouth, and Vanya stiffens, and then Allison closes her mouth and looks at her feet. “Okay,” she says softly. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be here when you’re ready, Vanya.”

Allison can’t help Vanya forgive her. Not yet, at least. Not when Vanya still flinches at human contact and is only just learning what it means to feel. Not when Vanya hasn’t even tried forgiving herself, when she’s stumbling blindly through life completely untethered from what she knew and understood. She wants to fix things with Allison, she does. But she isn’t _ready_. She can’t forgive Allison for taking her hearing when she hasn’t even come to terms with it.

“Thank you,” Vanya whispers, and Allison sends her a tired smile. Maybe this time, they can figure it out.

 

Maria pokes her head around the corner when Vanya walks up the stairs. Vanya waves. Maria says, “There was a man waiting for you here.” Vanya’s blood goes cold, her heart stops and then kicks into gear, and she feels a fear so strong that she nearly disconnects from the conversation entirely and has to ask Maria to repeat what she’d just said— “Curly hair? Tattoos, eyeliner. Seemed upset about something.”

“Oh,” breathes Vanya, “Oh, that’s Klaus. My brother.” Maria shrugs. “Sorry, I hope he didn’t bother you.”

Maria says, “No, I sent him away. He would have bothered _you_.”

Vanya feels her face go soft. “Thank you,” she says, though she knows it’s a strange thing to thank her landlady for. But Maria’s right. Vanya wouldn’t have felt up to dealing with Klaus, not after Allison. “He means well.”

Maria shrugs, as though she doesn’t care much, but her critical gaze roves over Vanya’s figure. “Have you eaten anything today?”

“I just had tea.”

Maria wrinkles her nose and huffs, unimpressed. She’s a coffee drinker. “Come inside. I will teach you to make gnocci.”

 

The next day, Vanya packs a bag. She adds a Walkman, second or seventh-hand from the nearby thrift store, and leftover Greek salad from dinner the night before with Maria. She walks to the bus stop, buys a ticket, and then catches a three-hour ride out of the city and into the woods. She avoids the groups of tourists and the dark-eyed teenage runaways, shouldering her bag and hiking into the woods until the well-worn paths fade to dirt.

Around her, the woods loom, tall and lush and green. When she sets her bag down on the ground, the sunlight has already turned hazy and golden and she’s stripped off her jacket and rolled up her sleeves, sweat-soaked. She’s standing in a valley, interspersed with trees and ringed by the forest, tall grasses sawing and gold-flecked by the afternoon light.

Even if she had her hearing back, there wouldn’t be the hum of traffic to distract her. There’s only the trees, swaying, the grasses, the singing birds. There is the forest, and there is Vanya.

She closes her eyes and takes deep breaths, trying to draw on the energy that sits ever-present under her skin. It rises to the surface, too quickly, too strong, keeping pace with her still-rapid heartbeat from her hike. Vanya yanks herself away from the stream of her power and the rhythm of her heartbeat, panting, and her hands shake when she unzips her backpack and pulls out the Walkman, because it’s too fast, too uncontrolled. She pushed herself too hard on the hike, and there’s a heavy sort of weight pressing against her ears, an oppressive silence, the static of rustling trees and her rushing blood amplified until she could almost drown on it. She keeps up a stream of quiet talking to distract herself as she pulls out the Walkman and the music tape from the thrift shop—nothing too repetitive or frantic, just _calm down you’re safe gonna take out the tape now it’s okay_ _no one is here._

She pushes the tape into the Walkman with trembling fingers, heartrate too elevated to think straight, the trees still rustling aggressively, presses the play button, and: the music floats through the air, tinny and metallic, and Vanya breathes.  _Build me up, buttercup baby, just to let me down, and mess me around, and then worst of all—_ Vanya breathes. She falls down onto the grass with a soft thump, golden light surrounding her, and closes her eyes. _Baby, baby, try to find a little time_. She knows she can’t hear the music properly, but it’s as loud as it can go and sitting on the ground by her good side, and it’s good enough for her. And it’s—it’s alright that she can’t hear it properly, with this, because what she needs is something more than white noise but less than a conductor, like her heartrate or her expanding lungs or the sound Leonard made when he hit the notebook—the wind picks up. Vanya threads her fingers through the grass and leans forward until her forehead touches the ground. She breathes.  _Build me up, buttercup, don’t break my heart._ Vanya breathes. The wind slows.

She sits up, eventually, when the song has already changed once or twice or three times. She sits in the grass, on her heels, and the wind blows all around her, making her hair float and kissing her cheeks lightly. And then Vanya laughs, open-mouthed, dirty fingers and sweaty shirt and all, because this is _her_. She’s safe, everyone’s safe, and Vanya is the wind. Vanya is the world. This is her. This is extraordinary. She is extraordinary.

 

She gets home at nearly twelve, and it’s so dark that she feels even more disorientated than usual but she’s too tired to get worked up by the conjoined lack of noise and light. She falls straight into bed, has a dreamless sleep, and heads out on the first bus out to the woods in the next morning, 6:30am sharp. She doesn’t really have the funds to buy bus tickets like this, but the bookshop employee said she should come in on Monday and that’s only a few days away, really. Considering the alternative (staying home, blowing up the moon, panic attacks on her couch,) Vanya thinks she could be doing worse.

She takes her ASL book for the bus trip and muses that if anyone would know how to help her discover how to handle powers, it’d be Five. Not really Five as he is now, pragmatic and hardened, but Five at thirteen years old, who hated Reginald with passion but loved to test his abilities and explore his capabilities. Five who jumped into the future not because he had to, but because he wanted to—because he felt he was ready for it, because he wanted to understand himself and his powers and he didn’t want to do it on Reginald’s terms.

But she doesn’t have Five with her, thirteen or fifty-eight, or any of her other siblings, and she thinks that until she figures out how to channel her power into something less cataclysmic, she’ll prefer solo self-exploration. Less likelihood of being locked away. She makes the hike in even less time and feels the clearing hum when she arrives. Vanya peels off her sticky flannel, letting air onto her tank top, and switches on the Walkman beside her.

Like yesterday, the wind picks up straight away, and like yesterday, Vanya is nearly overcome by the immediate outpouring of her unconscious ability—rainclouds bunch together around the clearing, and rain starts to fall. Vanya forms her hands into fists. “No!” She’s stronger than this. She points her chin towards the sky and narrows her eyes and _tries,_ but the rain picks up. “No, no, no—” She shakes her head, increasingly cold and afraid when the rain doesn’t leave. What if she can’t stop it? Is this even her?

The Walkman makes a crackled noise. Vanya closes her eyes, feeling the rain whipping into her face and lashing her hair, and she _breathes._ Slowly, she uncurls her palms. She tunes into her heartbeat, forces it to slow, and tries to focus on the way the ground feels under her feet. Slowly, the rain fades. Slowly, the sun remerges from the clouds, and the air sings with the sound of Vanya’s success, burning brighter, brighter, brighter.

While she eats her salad, she reaches out, tentative, to put her hand on a nearby tree. Focusing on the bounce and rhythm of the Walkman’s washed-out noise, she _pushes_ with her mind, gentle but firm, exploring. She can feel the different vibrations of the tree as she probes out with her senses, and she doesn’t even need her ears to feel the life under her hands. She gently pulls the branches up, up, and the roots go down, down, twisting in the earth, she feels them winding through the dirt under her shoes, and the tree stretches taller, taller, and she feels the bark sliding under her calloused fingertips.

When she leaves the clearing, it doesn’t look quite the same. There are flowers, nudged into bloom with a gentle touch, and the tree she hummed closer to the clouds, and the grass is shining from the rain and sunlight she shone down. When Vanya leaves the clearing, she doesn’t feel quite the same. She _isn’t_ the same, she knows she’s not. She’s lost some of the fear that had clogged her lungs ever since Leonard first started dripping poison into her ears. She feels like something within her has changed, has been set free, and when she reaches out for her powers she doesn’t have to break through a wall to find them. When she reaches out for her powers, they rise calmly to the surface of her skin, present and still for the first time in Vanya’s life. When she reaches for her powers, they’re just there, like a part of her she’s always had.  

 

Aimee knocks on her front door the next morning. She sees Vanya and her mouth drops open, and then she’s flinging her arms around Vanya’s neck. Vanya stumbles, shocked, but she doesn’t lash out or flinch, which is improvement.

Aimee pulls back quickly, and her expression is fierce. “Hi,” Vanya manages, shy and shocked, opening the door wider so Aimee can step inside.

Aimee doesn’t stop touching her, keeping one hand on Vanya’s sleeve, immune to the way Vanya goes still under her and the way she keeps glancing at the other woman’s fingers. “I came by two days ago,” she explains, “and you weren’t here, and then yesterday you weren’t here either, and your landlady—what a woman, by the way!—said she hadn’t seen you come by overnight, and I was worried, Vanya, I was worried.”

“Oh,” says Vanya, breathless, and Aimee stares at her. Vanya stares back. She doesn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry,” she says, then, because that’s what she knows how to say.

Aimee shakes her head, fond. She pulls her manicured fingers away from where they’d been playing with Vanya’s, and Vanya misses the touch immediately. “Where were you?”

Vanya shrugs. “Um, just—hiking. I was safe, I promise. I’m sorry for worrying you.”

Aimee sighs, but she doesn’t quite sound so distressed anymore. “Oh, it’s fine. I was probably overreacting.” She waves a hand flippantly, dismissing herself. Vanya frowns. Before she can overthink it, she takes Aimee’s hand and squeezes it once.

“No, I—I appreciate it. I’m sorry I just disappeared. I’ll let you know, next time.”

Aimee glances at their hands quickly, and Vanya pulls hers away, blushing. Aimee’s smiling at her. “Okay,” she says. “Thanks, Van. Or… you can take me with you, next time.”

They spend an hour together, catching up even though it hasn’t been long since they last saw each other. Aimee loves the plants around the apartment and grins when she catches sight of Vanya’s little washed-out clay pots and mugs. She invites Vanya to the next group lunch and says that it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t play with them anymore, that they want to see her again. She asks what Vanya’s been up to and Vanya answers honestly, not just with a generic cut-and-paste: she’s reconnecting with one of her brothers and has tentatively high hopes for her sister. She’s learning how to breathe without her ears. She’s learning how to live without mood suppressants. She has a blood test in a couple days. She has her ASL class on Monday.

Aimee’s smiling at her, and there’s light reflecting onto her face, and behind her, one of the potted plants starts to spin in the air.

* * *

She goes to the Academy, after Aimee leaves. It takes her a long time to walk the final steps around the corner, but she does it and that’s what matters, and the door is unlocked so she just slips inside and shudders through the early start of a panic attack, standing at the foot of the stairs and trying not to think about Luther and the way she ran to him.

“Vanya?” That’s Klaus’ voice, and she looks up, wide-eyed and somewhat frantic, and he’s standing there, staring. His eyes are red-rimmed and he looks about as miserable in this house as she feels.

“Hi, Klaus,” she says, turning to face him properly, and whatever he finds in her face must be good because his crumples and he comes flying down the stairs, tripping over his own feet, and then careening into her arms, crashing into her.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he says into her hair, and she can feel the tremors in his arms. He’s too skinny. She can hug him and touch her fingers to each other.

“It’s okay,” she answers, muffled by his shirt, and it is okay. They’re going to be okay. Klaus pulls away, probably remembering what she’d told him about Luther and staircases and hugs, but she makes sure to reach up a hand and brush his curls away from his forehead, showing him they’re okay with each other, she’s not mad at him. 

“Your landlady, she—and you weren’t there—and Allison, and—”

Vanya cuts him off. “It’s okay, Klaus.” She takes a breath. He watches her, eyes wide. “Let’s go home. Come on.”

Klaus falters. “What—are you sure? Are you—”

Vanya smiles at him, and it’s a small smile because it’s new to her face, but she means it and she tries to push everything she’s feeling onto the curve of her lips. “Let’s go, Klaus,” and this time, he nods.

When the walk out of the house, Vanya has Klaus’ arm looped through hers. Diego is watching them from the doorway, and his face is inscrutable, but the lines of his body are relaxed. He looks, for lack of a better description, somewhere between sad and soft.

He waves. Vanya waves back. And then she closes the door behind her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me, wanting to write soft!siblings but also knowing that they're gonna be ooc if I do since they barely ever interacted positively on the show: hhhhh
> 
> ANYWAYS ILY hope that didn't suck and you liked it!! feel welcome to leave me suggestions or requests of things you want to see! I'll do my best to incorporate them :)

**Author's Note:**

> pls review friends! :)
> 
> hope this didn't suck lol
> 
> ALSO I'm not done with this story yet!! part 2 shall come,, at some point. probably after exam week lol we love a procrastination queen


End file.
